Middle Age

I turned 40 years old this month. I figure that I ought to write something about it, even though in reality I feel nothing much about it. A friend who turned 40 earlier this year wrote me an encouraging note, "40 is the new 30, and 50 is the new 40."

Indeed perhaps in an unintended way 40 is the new 30, in that I only have a 2-year old son instead of two or three teenagers running around in the house. And maybe by extension, 30 is the new 20 in that it takes so long for young people to launch their careers these days. Well, that is, if you don't include the Silicon Valley technology entrepreneurs who start companies without finishing college.

A friend of mine has three kids, the oldest of whom is almost 28 years old. When this young man lost his job because the job was going to China, he did not think much of it. It has since been almost 2 years and he still has not found anything suitable. 28 is turning out to be the new 18 - implying that unless college graduates go for a professional or graduate degree, it is a very tough job market.

My hairdresser has two sons in college. I asked her what they would be doing during the summer, and she gave this deep sigh. One managed to get 1 day per week at Trader Joe's, and the other one is looking around for jobs at shopping malls. When there was an ad for a local shopping mall, she went over and asked, only to be told that her son need not apply if he did not have "experience".

Another friend in her 30s is working on her PhD thesis. She is often agonized by how long she has been in school because she changed her academic focus in the middle of graduate school. Now, going by the analogy, indeed if she were in her 20s, she would not question herself so much. We are supposed to experiment and explore in our 20s.

The first time I heard of the word "middle age", I thought that it referred to people of my mother's generation, who was in her late 30s then. I remember a very popular Chinese movie entitled "Getting to Middle Age" about a "middle-aged" doctor exhausted by her intense work as well as raising two kids, played by a youthful looking actress Pan Hong, who was about 30 years old at the time.

I guess people's definition of "middle age" has changed.